Have I been excited about your brand’s products lately? Have you been? If you’re a marketing or product manager or at a cordless power tool brand and asking yourself “is he talking about us?,” I probably am. For some brands, signals showing that they truly care about their products and end users keep getting weaker. Social media changed the ways brands communicate with channels like this one, but I see signs of apathy in all corners of a couple of tool brands’ operations. Some of are at the brink of irrelevancy, and eventually obscurity. It sometimes feels like a lot of cordless power tool brands have given up the fight, as if there’s no point in competing for second-to-last place. Of the three remaining, I bought into one but wish I hadn’t, I wouldn’t touch anything from another, and the last one has continually disappointed me with their apathetic attitude. There are 7 cordless power tool brands represented in this graphic.Īs a tool user, I would buy into one for their unwavering commitment to end users, another for their continued drive towards a cordless jobsite with competent solutions, another for their focus on DIY interests and needs, and the last one because they do their own thing, which often results in clever products. Tool brands need to work harder to gain and retain users, but many are not. I’ve been a bit worried about the brands in the “everyone else” category – the ones competing for the far-off third place. There’s Dewalt and Milwaukee – in no particular order – and then everyone else.
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Similar is happening in the cordless power tool industry. These top 5 brands hold more than 94% of the digital camera market share.īut when you take a closer look, the top-selling brand shipped more than 10X the number of units compared to the 5th selling brand, and the second best-selling brand shipped more units than the third, fourth, and fifth best-selling brands combined, and not by a small margin. Looking at the numbers in one report, Canon shipped nearly 1.8X the number of units as Sony, Sony shipped more than 2.2X the number of units as Nikon, Nikon shipped more than 2X the number of units as Fuji, and Fuji shipped around 1.38X the number of units compared to Panasonic. Various statistics and research companies report Canon as shipping the most number of units in 2023, followed by Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm, and Panasonic, in that order. Why? I asked a product manager just that, and they told me it was because those earlier brushed motor tools lacked the power and endurance to be called grinders.Ĭordless tool users have it pretty good these days.ĭespite now being what I’d consider the golden age of cordless power tools, I think many tool brands will face increasing challenges.Ĭonsider the digital camera industry. How can modern cordless circular saws be made better? Most pro models have ample power and runtime.īack when the first Li-ion-powered cordless angle grinders were released, they were marketed as cut-off tools. There are exciting new tools coming out, but I think we are definitely in an iterative and evolutionary phase right now where advancements will be smaller and more incremental. This is the golden age in cordless tools.ĭo you remember the time before cordless drill and impact driver LED worklights had an “afterglow” feature, where the lights remain on for a set delay following trigger switch release? Grinders have practical runtimes.Ĭordless table saws. New 7-1/4″ cordless circular saws don’t bog down. Newer tools aren’t leaps and bounds better, but have been optimized for productivity and improved user experiences. The cordless drill torque wars are over, with high performance drills now topping 1,000 in-lbs max torque with little reason to keep going higher. Often, users benefit from being able to select from multiple competitive and compelling choices.
![millwaukee to dewalt battery adapters millwaukee to dewalt battery adapters](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4B3l6sZHalc/maxresdefault.jpg)
![millwaukee to dewalt battery adapters millwaukee to dewalt battery adapters](https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/3527971517543183794.jpg)
There are cordless tools for that – and they’re good.